Rate My Professor Eske Derks

Professor Eske Derks is Professor of Psychiatric Genetics and Senior Group Leader of the Translational Neurogenomics Laboratory at QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute. She obtained her PhD in behaviour genetics from the Free University Amsterdam. Her research investigates biological mechanisms underlying neuropsychiatric disease through the impact of genetic risk factors on gene expression, with the goal of translating genetic findings into clinical applications. Professor Derks has an international reputation in psychiatric genetics and has contributed to identifying genetic risk factors for conditions including schizophrenia and substance use disorders.

She was the first to integrate genetic and transcriptomic data from 13 brain tissues to improve functional interpretation of genetic findings for five psychiatric disorders, as detailed in a senior-author paper in Nature Genetics, and for other complex traits in a 2018 Nature Genetics publication. As co-PI of the International Cannabis Consortium, she has led large meta-analyses on the genetics of cannabis use, including one involving 184,765 subjects that identified 35 associated genes. Professor Derks serves on the executive board of the OCD group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium and has published in journals including Science, Nature Genetics, and Molecular Psychiatry. Her areas of interest include genetics, eQTL analysis, mental health disorders, genome-wide association studies, and exome chip analyses.